In laboratory settings, a single pipette and/or a multi-pipette device may be used to pipette fluids into and out of tubes (“tubes” is used herein to also indicate wells of a multiplate). When aspirating tubes, microplate processing steps may desire to leave a defined residual volume in the wells—for example, to avoid disturbing or aspirating particles in the bottoms of the tubes. Certain processing steps require consistent remaining volumes or undisturbed pellets in the bottoms of the tubes. However, handheld multi-pipette devices make this defined-level aspiration a manual, subjective process. This is exacerbated in high-throughput applications, which require numerous different operators, multiple sites, and a large quantity of results, sometimes over many days. Fully-automated liquid handling robots are commercially available, but they are very expensive and require a different skillset for operation than the skills available to the typical laboratory operator. Truly consistent defined-level aspiration results are not achievable with the current manually operated multi-pipette devices.